Thousands of companies worldwide, SMBs to enterprises are developing various types of chatbots that focus on accelerating their customer experience and curtailing support costs. 

Chatbots are supporting companies to engage and interact with potential and existing customers 24/7. 

You might be wondering how many types of chatbots are there. There are hundreds of types of chatbots but the classification of chatbots depends on two main things:

• Business Use Cases – the problem you are trying to solve
• Chatbot Functionalities – the features you are trying to incorporate

In the article below, we will help you understand the different types of chatbots, what these are used for, and what type of chatbot technology could have the biggest value for your business.

Prior to discussing the different types of chatbots, let’s take a glance at the top benefits of chatbots, which is why more and more businesses are deploying bots.

Why do Businesses Need to Leverage Various Types of Chatbots?

Businesses deploy different types of chatbots based on their use cases starting from streamlining the business processes to enhancing customer engagement and increasing productivity. Bots help to convert users to customers, drive sales, and improve the overall consumer experience. 

Let’s take a look at the key advantages of a chatbot. 

• Increase Customer Engagement – Bots can deliver quick answers by being 24×7 available which encourages customers to stay longer on your website and maintain the conversation.
• Improve Lead Generation –  Businesses can use chatbots for lead generation to guide customers in making quick decisions. Bots use a preset questionnaire to persuade visitors for lead generation and ensure higher conversion rates.
• Reduce Customer Service Costs – Implementing chatbots is an investment to optimize customer service costs. Bots can save you extra costs that otherwise go into hiring more support resources, infrastructure, training, etc. 
• Balance Automation with Human Touch – You can understand the difference between chatbot vs live chat and try to integrate them together for better customer service.  The smooth transition between chatbot to live chat provides real-time responses to the customers, giving them the best hybrid experience.
• Achieve Scalability of Support – Chatbots are easily scalable to effectively handle peak hours without the need to add more support reps or other costs.
• Streamline Your Customer Onboarding Process – Customers like to be guided no matter how many support tutorials you offer them. Chatbots prove to be handy to educate customers and ease the onboarding process.

REVE Chatbot platform offers you default templates to build bots and to customize too as per your business needs. Signup for 14 days free trial to test drive REVE Chat’s chatbot platform.

Five Different Types of Chatbots for Businesses

A chatbot deployed on the eCommerce website would be totally different from the one implemented on the banking site. Just as humans contrast in personality, traits, or capabilities, the same goes for chatbots.

Here we will discuss what are the different types of chatbots, their applications, and their functionalities. It will give you a fair understanding of chatbot classification and what would be the ideal chatbot type for your business.

So, let’s dive in.

1. Rule-Based Chatbots

Rule-based chatbots also referred to as decision-tree bots, use a series of defined rules. These rules are the basis for the types of problems the chatbot can be familiar with and deliver solutions for. Like a flowchart, rule-based chatbots map out conversations. 

Rule-based or scripted are the types of chatbots that can be used to answer common questions – for instance, booking a table in a restaurant or buying tickets to the cinema. Followed by a decision tree, the customers are provided a set of predefined options that leads to the relevant answer.

2. Conversational AI Chatbots

AI-enabled chatbots combine the power of Machine Learning (ML) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the context and intent of a question before formulating a response. 

Such conversational AI bots generate their own answers to more complicated questions using natural-language responses. The more you use and train these bots, the more they learn and the better they operate with the user.

Conversational chatbots are a win over rule-based bots in the identification of user context and intention. They can thus decipher a user’s query and deliver a personalized experience.

3. Contextual Chatbots

The most advanced type of conversational chatbot is a contextual bot. 

In order to remember the conversations that happened earlier, these types of chatbots make use of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), with particular users, to learn and grow with the passage of time. 

Contextual chatbots learn by experience with the user. A few examples of these chatbots are Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, etc.

4. Voice-Enabled Chatbots

The voice-enabled type of chatbot makes personalized experiences for users. To make conversational interfaces even more vernacular, businesses are now using voice-based chatbots or voice bots. 

The voice-enabled chatbots accept the user’s input when they speak, act upon the request, reply to queries, and perform numerous creative tasks. By using text-to-speech (TTS) and voice recognition APIs, businesses can make their own voice-activated chatbot.

Voice bots have been on the rise for the last couple of years, with virtual assistants like Apple’s Siri, and Amazon’s Alexa, and why? 

Because of the convenience they bring. It’s much easier for a customer to speak rather than type. A voice-activated chatbot brings frictionless experiences directly to the end customer.

5. Hybrid Chatbots

Hybrid chatbots are an amalgamation of simple (rule or script-based) and smart (conversational AI-based) AI-based. 

The hybrid chatbot model offers the best of both worlds- the simplicity of the rules-based chatbots, with the complexity of the AI bots.

These bots have some rule-based tasks, and they can understand intent and context. It makes them a balanced tool for businesses to interact with customers. 

Types of Chatbot’s Purpose For Business Growth

Did you know which industries are benefiting from chatbots? The finance, healthcare, education, travel, and real estate industries. Also, roughly 80% of businesses are projected to integrate some type of chatbot technology by 2023.

Here is the categorization of all types of chatbots under their respective purposes. Let’s have a look!

#1. Customer Service Chatbots

Customer service is one of the vital business functions where chatbots have a great impact. 67% of consumers worldwide used a chatbot for customer support. 

Customer service chatbots can help businesses to engage clients by answering FAQs and delivering context to conversations. Businesses can save support costs by speeding up response times and improving first response time which boosts user experience. 

Key use cases of support chatbot:

• Automate website support: Deploying chatbots on your website boosts operational efficiency and offers convenience to customers. Bots not only streamline customer experiences at every stage in the service process but are also aids to the support agents.
• Handle helpdesk support: Bots are self-learning software systems that analyze human language. They can help your IT help desk to boost team productivity and drive efficiency.
• Collect customer feedback: Chatbots are a great way to acquire customer feedback. By following the chatbot best practices, you can generate a high level of engagement that encourages customers in completing surveys.
• Order confirmation & tracking shipping: Support chatbots are the best way to combat the traditional process and deliver an excellent brand experience. Customers can stay updated easily just by entering the shipping id.
• Handle refunds & return requests: Chatbots can handle common queries by reducing support tickets and increasing team productivity.

#2. Sales or Lead Generation Chatbots

Leveraging sales bots help businesses in asking contextually relevant questions, qualifying leads, and booking sales meetings, at scale. 

Chatbots convert 4x higher than traditional lead generation tools because people prefer conversations. So, engage with your visitors 24×7, to interact, and generate more leads.

Key use cases of sales chatbot:

• Automate sales funnel: Lead generation chatbots can create exceptional conversational experiences for website visitors and qualify them at scale. The leads are then directed to the right sales rep for closing sales immediately or booking an appointment. 
• Lead nurturing: Leveraging sales chatbots can nurture leads by engaging customers in different ways like – giving personalized product recommendations, suggesting the best combo offers, or offering discount coupons to boost sales. 
• Appointment bookings: Advanced AI bots that meet the latest artificial intelligence trends can enable automated appointment booking to help customers book instantly from your website or Facebook page. 
• Place online orders: 1 in 5 consumers would consider purchasing goods and services from a chatbot. Be it food, electronics or apparel chatbots are prompt in handling online orders. 

#3. Chatbots for Marketing

Chatbots are greatly revolutionizing the marketing ecosystem for many businesses, while the goal remains the same for all i.e. instant and convenient service. 

Key use cases of a marketing chatbot:

• Better customer engagement: Chatbots can engage with your customers with immediate responses and increase customer satisfaction, which makes them happy to retain your brand. 
• Offer product recommendations: AI bots can help your customers to proceed to the final stage of the sales funnel by recommending relevant products that they might be interested in. 
• News chatbots: Chatbots save time by getting curated news and headlines right inside your messenger. Many popular news portals and television networks introduced chatbot services. CNN was one of the first news businesses to build a bot on the Facebook Messenger platform.

#4. Banking/Insurance Chatbots

Chatbots are effortlessly enhancing the digital customer experience in banking and also achieving a range of other benefits. 

From balance inquiries to account openings to quick replies, banking bots can help serve users promptly and efficiently, therefore enhancing the customer experience.

Key use cases of a banking chatbot:  

• Automate customer support: AI bots help banks in automating support for common queries and focus more on serving the customers in a better way. The customer service chatbots can handle non-complex queries related to banking products and customer accounts. 
• Reminders and notifications: Chatbots can send timely reminders and routine notifications to customers that include bill payment deadlines, the last days of some loan offers, etc. 
• Proactive customer communication: AI-powered bots can be deployed within an app or on the website, or on browsing pages to pre-empt customers with quick answers. 
• Financial advice and assistance: Bots leveraged on the bank websites or within the app as a personal financial guide. Banks will have many ways to use chatbots for financial services and improve customer experience. 

#5. In-App Messaging Chatbots

Chatbots that are integrated with a social messaging platform like Messenger, Telegram, Slack, Whatsapp, etc are termed messaging chatbots. 

Customers prefer brands offering bot support. 47% of users are open to purchasing items through a bot. 

Chatbots can engage customers by answering their simple queries when the support team is busy or not available. 

These types of chatbots make it simple for customers to directly connect with the bot using social media handles just like the way they talk to their friends. 

Social messaging chatbots can sell and process orders, track order information, and answer frequently asked questions (FAQs). It cuts down a lot of costs for online businesses and also offers instant interaction to users.

#6. Chatbots for Human Resource

Recruitment is an important part of HR activity. With chatbots, tasks can be handled seamlessly. 

Human Capital Trends report found that only 17% of global HR executives are ready to manage a workforce with people, robots, and AI working side by side. 

The chatbot acts as a recruiting assistant and manages large candidate pools so that the recruiters and hiring managers have more time to focus on interviews and closing offers.

#7. Healthcare Chatbots

Healthcare chatbots help in automating all the repetitive, and lower-level tasks of the medical representatives. While bots handle simple tasks seamlessly, healthcare professionals can focus more on complex tasks effectively.

Key use cases of a healthcare chatbot:

• Easy appointment scheduling: Healthcare bots are a great way to overcome the challenge of the patients to navigate the scheduling systems. With a messaging interface, website/app visitors can easily access a chatbot. 
• Effective patient engagement: AI-enabled patient engagement chatbots in healthcare provide prospective and current patients with immediate, specific, and accurate information to improve patient care and services.
• Gather patient information: FAQs related to the patient’s name, address, contact number, symptoms, current doctor, and insurance information can be used to extract information by deploying healthcare chatbots. 
• Recommend wellness programs: Healthcare chatbots backed with NLP can understand user intent with the help of sentiment analysis. Based on the understanding of the user input, the bot can recommend appropriate healthcare plans.

#8. Social Media Chatbots

One of the vital undeniable aspects is to engage with customers where they are. 

With an increase in messenger platforms for business, one of the most important channels is social.

Chatbots significantly boost user engagement on these popular social websites and communicate with customers through live chat platforms like Facebook Messenger. 

Bots are taking over social media marketing as they allow consumers to engage with them in terms of customer service, and transactional engagements.

Different Types of Chabot Used Across Different Industries 

Chatbots are of different abilities from different chatbot platforms and fulfill various purposes in each industry. Different types of chatbots can be used for different businesses, from those that deal with simple requests, to those that handle advanced queries. 

Here are some use cases for different industries and examples of how they have been deployed.

• Real Estate: Real estate is a relationship-oriented industry by nature. Chatbots can’t replace that client-agent relationship, but they can replace agents in answering general real estate questions. Holmes is a real estate chatbot that uses AI to answer customer queries in real time.
• Travel Industry: The travel and tourism industry witnessed more international customers willing to do business. One of the problems with the travel business is catering 24×7 support. Chatbot, allows you to handle customer queries and generate leads around the clock. Hello Hipmunk is a completely free and helpful bot that does all the work for you.
• Food & Beverage: The food industry is one of the industries that has experienced the most success with chatbots. Pizza chains have been among the most prolific adopters of chatbot technology. Domino’s is the first major brand to launch a chatbot on Facebook Messenger and generates nearly $5bn a year.
• Airlines: Many airlines are deploying chatbots to help their customers answer common questions and obtain basic information about their flights. Aeroméxico launched its chatbot to serve 1,000 customers per day.
• Entertainment: People use FB Messenger via phone every day, which is why Messenger chatbot games were developed. The most followed chatbot game is MojiHunt. It was followed by more than 20 000 users.
• Legal Services: Analyzing documents is a time-consuming process in the legal industry. JP Morgan Chase launched COIN bot to manage its back-office operations. It can analyze complex contracts quicker and more proficiently than human lawyers. 
• Railways: IRCTC is aimed at facilitating accessibility by answering users’ queries pertaining to various services offered to railway passengers. They launched AI-powered voice-enabled ASKDISHA chatbot to converse with customers in the Hindi language.

Final thoughts

As technology continues to enable smart AI chatbots, more users will choose to interact with them in their everyday lives because the right chatbot knows how to respond appropriately to their concerns on time. For customer service firms, this means improved customer relationships.

The above article focuses on five different types of chatbots along with their purpose and key use cases. Also, there are different ways to implement the AI bot, depending on the use case. 

Hopefully, you now know enough through this chatbot guide and are ready to implement one of the bots in your own business.

In today’s rapidly changing business environment, a successful organization adopts various pragmatic approaches to build its own niche market. The approach is designed in such a way that it enhances business revenues while strengthening the customer relationship.

Organizations can achieve this by successfully delivering world-class customer service in the BPO (business processing outsourcers) industry.

Hence, companies subcontracting their business functions expect service providers to optimize their client experience by sharing all the relevant and important information about the company’s offerings. 

In reverse, it creates word of mouth that significantly plays an important role for the companies to gain a competitive edge and increase brand visibility in the marketplace.

What is Customer Service in the BPO Industry?

Customer service in BPOs refers to the outsourcing customer service companies that specialize in handling customer queries that come in via email, chat, phone, social media, and other channels in real-time. It means addressing customer concerns effectively by using digital tools like live chat, chatbots, and co-browsing.

When customers consistently have positive interactions with your representatives, they’re more likely to become repeat customers or recommend their friends or family to your business. In fact, 80% of customers say the experience a company provides is just as important as its products or services.

Key Importance of Customer Service in BPO

Customer support management requires special attention to promptly address and resolve user issues in no time. A company managing this task in-house is generally unable to focus on other core business functions. 

Leveraging a well-planned inbound customer support service of BPO directly addresses this issue by providing customized services, such as inquiry handling, technical support, phone answering, customer surveys, and medical answering services.

We will analyze the criteria needed for more insight into the importance of customer service in BPO. 

#1. Increase Customer Retention

Every customer interaction can positively or negatively impact your brand, so making every customer interaction count is essential.

While every business needs new clients, it is equally critical to improving customer retention as acquisition costs are five times more than retaining an existing customer.

Having a framework for personalized communications, including the latest customer communication tools like live chat, chatbot, video chat allows you to provide meaningful and results-driven messaging to customers. 

Superior customer service in BPO impacts retention significantly. Here is how.

• When BPOs focus on delivering excellent customer service, it cultivates loyalty. It creates an unforgettable experience by delighting customers and engaging them in meaningful interaction, forging loyal relationships.
• Providing improved customer service increases customer lifetime value (CLTV) and retention rate levels by 5%, with a boost in profits of 25% to 95%. Hence, BPOs focus on retaining customers as well as acquiring customers for sustainable growth.

#2. Boost Customer Satisfaction Ratio

Undoubtedly, customer service in the BPO industry is an excellent differentiator.

Here is how – For example, more than half of customers stop doing business after one poor service experience, and 67% of the churn is preventable if the customer’s problem is resolved during their first interaction. 

It means if you provide superior customer service, you will not only retain your customers, but you will also surpass your competitors.

A well-trained team empowered with visual engagement tools provides the ability to converse with customers directly and grow your customer base.

How to improve customer service in the BPO industry with digital engagement tools?

• Improve first contact resolution –  Leveraging advanced tools goes a long way towards promoting first contact resolution (FCR) and preventing customers from returning back.
• Reduce the number of touchpoints – Gaining a visual understanding of the issue by using tools like co-browsing and video chat, businesses can offer a concrete solution and improve average resolution time.
• Boost customer satisfaction – Visual engagement facilitates hassle-free communication and real time collaboration to guide your customers through complex workflows and provide personalized customer service solutions.

#3. Deliver High Quality Service in Real Time

One of the top expectations of customers from any company is to get real time service. 

They don’t want to feel like they’re being treated just as another person. Instead, they expect to feel a personal connection with a representative that has the insight and expertise to resolve their issues.

According to a recent survey 66% of customers said they would switch brands if they felt they were being “treated like a number, not an individual.”

There are many options that will help you to meet customer expectations if you want to attract and retain loyal customers.

• Live chat software helps businesses to address sales & support concerns in real time and offer effective solutions that boost their satisfaction.
• Deploying AI enabled chatbots helps to automate customer support and offer 24×7 personalized assistance.
• Create self-service options and a helpful FAQ section that helps customers to find out the solutions without reaching out to the customer service staff.

#4. Enhance Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)

Customer lifetime value (CLTV) is one of the most important customer service KPIs for the BPO industry. 

• It showcases the total revenue you can expect from a single customer account, and growing the value indicates that your customers are using your services more frequently.
• It makes new customers trust more on your business and allows you to upsell and cross-sell additional products/services with minimal friction. 
• The new customers also rely on the BPO customer service team when they recommend services that fit their needs.

It creates overall a better experience. 

Leveraging innovative technologies provide a solid foundation for efficient, high-quality customer service and allow the BPO sector to collect detailed data on customer service performance. The data is analyzed regularly to make sure your business and customers realize all the benefits.

#5. Improve Customer Loyalty

Keeping customers coming back for more is critical to business success. Loyal customers are just better for business: they help you grow and keep profits high.

Improving the standards of customer service in the BPO industry help to retain existing customers, attract new customers, reduce turnover and drive profits.

• Increase sales conversions –  Returning customers spend close to 70% more money on products and services when compared to first-time customers. Once a customer likes the service you offer, they’re more likely to purchase in higher quantities.
• Boost repeat business – The loyal customers are most likely to keep coming back to purchase from your business. They like the service and way you value customers and are inclined towards the brand. 

#6. Positive Word of Mouth

Loyal customers keep coming back themselves, they will spread brand awareness through word-of-mouth marketing. 

Happy clients increase customer loyalty and are likely to tell friends and family about your business and products.

When customers are addressed in real time, provided effective solutions, and valued their opinions they choose to stick to the brand for a longer time.

Improved customer service in BPO enables you to develop lasting customer relationships who become loyal to your brand. 

Eventually, they might even turn out to be your brand ambassadors and spread positive word of mouth.

How to Improve Customer Service in the BPO Industry?

Providing great customer service in the BPO industry is a benefit to both you and your audience. Offering good service will help satisfy your clients. Happy customers boost your revenue. 

A company’s overall revenue emphasizes the importance of customer satisfaction. To help your company with this, here are seven strategies to improve customer service in the BPO industry and boost satisfaction.

1. Improve First Call Resolution (FCR)

FCR is one of the top metrics and the BPO industry needs to focus to keep it improving. It reflects your team’s ability to resolve customer issues or complaints the first time they reach out to you, with no additional follow-ups required. Try avoiding call transfers, as every switch of the phone line drastically reduces customer satisfaction.

2. Train your BPO staff consistently

Inadequate knowledge about your products/services can hamper the customer experience. Hence, consistent training is vital to level up the standards of your customer service in BPO. Well-trained agents are up-to-date on industry changes, have expanded skills-sets, and treat customers with empathy. 

3. Reduce queue time

No customer likes to be on-hold and they hang up when they feel your business does not value their time. BPOs should balance the hold function and must equip agents with enough resources and tools to retrieve the right information within seconds, thereby eliminating the need to put someone on hold for too long.

4. Acquire customer feedback

Today’s customers share their feedback about a product or an experience across social channels. To enhance customer service in BPO there should be a feedback loop to capture valuable customer opinions. To get customer feedback, you can share survey links via text message or email seconds after the call is completed. The outcome helps to understand customer satisfaction, their pain points, agent performance, and plan the scope for improvement accordingly.

5. Establish excellent customer service models 

While hiring new call center representatives, you need to plan training sessions with the more experienced CSRs to help them learn what an ideal client call looks like. Such an approach creates a good opinion of your best practices in action and can witness the soft skills required for exceptional service. Such training sessions can bridge the gap between their training and call execution.

6. Personalize calls to improve customer service in BPO

Inbound call centers deal with hundreds of callers regularly, and personalizing every call is an ardent task. The last thing that every customer wants when they reach out to your business is  robotic voice passing generic messages. Having a centralized CRM can provide your reps all customer details.

7. Focus on building strong relationships

The final of our five top customer service tips may be seen as a summary of all that’s come before it: personal work relationships should be your top priority. Do your best to make your agents feel like actual people, rather than expendable workers.

Invest in Customer Service in BPO Industry 

The customers take the center stage in the BPO industry, hence it is crucial to invest in the latest tools and technologies that help to deliver exceptional customer service in BPO. Across all industries customers are better informed so empowering your support squad with adequate training, customer engagement tools and tactics will help to win over them and increase their lifetime value. 

REVE Chat is one of the best live chat platforms that offers real time sales and support assistance, empowering your customer service team to delight your customers by understanding and fulfilling their expectations. 

Sign up with REVE Chat today and level up your standards of customer service in the BPO industry.

There is a new baseline for the customer experience in banking. 

People expect more channels, and faster and personalized responses without long wait times. Banking customers want their financial institutions to provide more than just basic service – they want insights, guidance, and relevant recommendations. 

Hence, improving customer service in banking is crucial. 

A study by Accenture shows that 48% of bank customers demand preferential treatment and rewards in exchange for their loyalty to your bank.

In the banking industry, where technology continues to evolve the way we handle personal and business finances, quality customer care includes keeping pace with both live and digital options for handling simple to complex transactions.

What is Good Customer Service in Banking?

Customer service in the banking sector depends on efficient and prompt customer service. Customer service is the most important duty of the banking operations. Prompt and efficient service will develop good public relations, reduce complaints and increase business.

Providing quality customer service is important in the banking industry because it makes customers feel valued, helps you meet their needs more effectively and improves your overall customer retention in banking as well.

Key Importance of Customer Service in Banking

Financial institutions have amongst the highest customer acquisition costs in the industry today. Acquiring new customers can cost five times more than retaining existing ones. Hence, it is essential to adopt the right strategies to improve customer service in banking.

Customer service means different things in different industries, but it always boils down to the same basic element – providing superior levels of service to your customers. 

• Changing customer expectations – Customers today are more demanding and more sophisticated than he or she was thirty years ago.
• Increased importance of customer service – With changing customer expectations, competitors are seeing customer service as a competitive weapon with which they differentiate their products and services.
• Need for a relationship strategy – To ensure that a customer service strategy that will create a value proposition for customers should be formulated, implemented and controlled. It is necessary to give it a central role and not one that is subsumed in the various elements of the marketing mix.

10 Practical Strategies to Improve Customer Service in Banking

Today’s customer expects personal, relevant, accessible-anywhere experiences when they interact with businesses — and modern finance is no exception. With new post-pandemic norms setting in, digital-first service keeps customers connected to your offerings anywhere they need them.

1. Monitor end-to-end customer journeys to create 360° view 
2. Provide Real Time Support
3. Deliver Personalized Experience
4. Leverage a Banking Chatbot
5. Develop an Omnichannel Experience
6. Conduct Training on Intrapersonal Skills
7. Create Knowledge Base for Self Help
8. Solicit Customer Feedback
9. Revitalize Digital Experience
10. Make Use of Contextual Data 

Let us dive in to understand how each strategy can deliver exceptional customer experience in banking.

1. Monitor end-to-end customer journeys to create 360° view 

Mapping out your customer journeys is crucial to deliver the exact service that customers are expecting. 

First things first! You have to identify all touchpoints across all channels where you engage with customers. A common banking customer journey may include:

• A business professional checking account balance online
• Depositing a paycheck in-branch
• Verifying the deposited funds on a smartphone. 

You should have feedback experiences in place at all three touchpoints. Then by identifying target customers, create customer personas and focus towards your customer experience program.

Secondly, outline the journey for how customers engage with your institution. Start your journey map with the first point of contact and each next step and all potential steps until the journey is complete.

Finally, identify at-risk customers and proactively engage on a personal level to improve the relationship.

Note: If financial institutions can learn to identify at-risk customers, proactively engage on a personal level, and identify what is causing the customer’s behavior, companies have a much higher chance of keeping a customer loyal, maybe even for life.

The goal is to use experience management to move from reactive to predictive, and eventually, to a state of delivering exceptional experiences across all touchpoints.

2. Provide Real Time Support

People want to organize their finances on the go and find answers quickly online and the best option is live chat. 

Citibank reported that 90% of live chat users complete their home-equity application.

Live chat is a powerful tool to counter the bureaucratic and impersonal feel of banking institutions. It provides your customers with personal human support that’s easy to reach.

American Airlines Federal Credit Union recognized the advantages of live chat and empowered their service reps to engage customers in real time . The biggest German institutions like Hypovereinsbank and Targobank also use live chat as their main customer service tool.

How can live chat improve customer service in the banking industry?

• Increase sales conversions – Live chat can address customer queries instantly and help in faster decision making leading to more sales. It can also approach customers proactively – if they are stuck at some page/point you can trigger for a chat window to automatically open with an invite to chat.
• Sending files securely – Implementing a GDPR adhered complaint based live chat solution makes live chat suitable for directly sending files to your customers.
• Address customer concerns instantly – Live chat provides instant solutions for banking and financial queries with the help of digital engagement tools like video chat, co-browsing in order to deliver better customer service.
• Reduce customer support costs – With canned responses, you can handle multiple chats and offer faster responses. Live chat increases the efficiency of service reps by automated routing and delivers better banking support.

3. Deliver Personalized Experience

Personalized experience in any industry always pays off well. In the banking sector video chat is a wonderful tool that can have a positive impact on various aspects.

Video chat in customer service for banks has witnessed a whopping 70% growth. Its value even grows further when used in combination with other tools for customer engagement.

When the situations are complex where visual cues hold huge importance, a video chat platform emerges as the only option to ensure the best personal support.  

Benefits of video chat for customer service in banking

• Live customer engagement – Video chat helps businesses interact directly with customers on the website or mobile apps and improve the level of engagement manifold.
• Deliver personalized experience – When you combine a video chat platform with other customer engagement tools like live chat and chatbots, it’s always easy to provide personalized experiences at any time through the different stages of the journey. 
• Faster resolution of issues – By using co-browsing and video chat together, it becomes easy to collaborate with customers in real-time and fix issues faster. 
• Offer proactive support – The use of cross-platform video chat proves very handy in offering proactive support and effective engagement once you have gained insights about your customer journey. 

4. Leverage a Banking Chatbot

AI in banking customer service is gradually gaining wide acceptance. They are not only simplifying the processes for businesses but also enabling quick access to services that were formerly confined to apps.

Banks need to improve the quality of their customer service without sacrificing time to redundant user queries. 

Subsequently, banks now understand the importance of automation and 24×7 services that are not only convenient to them but to their customers. It means seamlessly providing scalable 24×7 customer support on multiple channels and languages.

AI Chatbots in banking customer service can help streamline transactions like money transfers and account balance checks via a conversational interface so that customers are constantly guided through their actions

How deploying an AI chatbot helps to deliver better customer service?

• Engage consumers 24×7 – A banking chatbot can be deployed on the website or on browsing pages to start conversations. It helps them analyze user behavior or interests, or introduce to them banking products.
• Deliver great conversational experience – AI bots respond accurately to the inputs of customers  and provide conversational experiences at each step of the journey. They route complex chats to the right human rep to ensure a humanized support.
• Offer personalized services – With the help of chatbot analytics (that captures user  behavior, trends and patterns) you can deliver relevant and personalized services and offers to customers.
• Automated support for FAQs – Bots are available 24×7 and banks can deploy them to solve customer problems any time without requiring human intervention. AI bots with advanced algorithms and machine learning ability can answer complex queries.

5. Develop an Omnichannel Experience

Nowadays, basic transactions in banks are speedily migrating from the physical to the digital channels. According to Reuters, 60% of customers would still prefer to open a new checking account at a bank branch rather than through digital channels

A majority of banks have adopted the omnichannel approach at the core of their strategies. 

It’s because banks have understood that ease, innovation, simplicity, and accessibility of platforms provided by FinTech companies can influence the customer behaviors quite strongly.

An omnichannel customer service strategy allows you to use all available marketing channels to achieve an integrated and seamless customer experience. 

The customer, on the other hand, is able to move from your app to the website to push notifications to social media, experiencing the same branding and messaging throughout in a synchronized way. 

How can an omnichannel approach benefit customer service in banking?

• Faster resolution rate – Omnichannel banks are capable of handling customer requests faster by using digital tools and strategies which increases the resolution rate as well as customer satisfaction.
• Improved customer experience – When banks engage across all online and offline customer service channels and deliver consistent support, there is a boost in customer experience.
• Streamline customer journey for better insights – Banks can easily understand the customer lifecycle better with conversation history and deliver personalized real time support.
• Reduce customer churn –  Customers expect instant response and when they are entertained across their preferred channels in real time, there is a significant reduction in the customer churn rate.

Note: However, banks should amalgamate traditional and digital components in order to create an omnichannel customer experience.

6. Conduct Training on Intrapersonal Skills

Financial matters are very critical to handle, so having frontline employees with exceptional interpersonal skills is an asset for any financial institution.

For example – There might be circumstances where you may find yourself in situations where you need to explain to a customer why their loan application has been denied or why a mortgage cannot be processed.

While it is important to be clear and transparent in explaining the options, one must display empathy and maintain the utmost composure. It will certainly go a long way in helping customers feel reassured.

So banks and financial service providers must invest in customer service training for employees to have them ready to navigate all possible scenarios. 

At times it may appear like these are additional costs that impact the bank’s bottom line, but at the same time will be made good by clients who stick with you because of good customer service.

7. Create Knowledge Base for Self Help

As banks face new and evolving challenges, including digitization, virtualization of the workplace, government regulations, and growing security concerns, they can gain a competitive advantage with knowledge management.

74% of customers report that they use a self-service support portal to resolve issues on their own before contacting a live service representative.

Creating knowledge base in the banking sector allows financial services organizations to more efficiently store and organize knowledge, which enables bank managers and employees to collaborate and stay aligned on short- and long-term initiatives. 

How to improve customer service in the banking industry with knowledge base?

• Ensure bank customers receive consistent information at any branch –  A centralized knowledge management system ensures that all employees have access to the same information, so they can then provide standardized answers to customers.
• Create a consistent brand experience, both digitally and in person – With a comprehensive knowledge base, you can ensure that you present a unified experience, no matter how a customer interacts.
• Provide all bank employees with up-to-date regulatory updates – A knowledge base system ensures that all employees receive updates about regulatory changes and understand how they impact the bank and its customers.  
• Offer a holistic view of market research and customer insights – By using a knowledge management platform to centralize all research and give all internal stakeholders access to the insights they need to make informed decisions.
• Enhance overall customer satisfaction and the CX –  When banks are equipped with a knowledge management system, employees can quickly search for the information they need to provide comprehensive solutions to client issues.

8. Solicit Customer Feedback

Customers are the ones who can anticipate their needs better than anybody else. 

After all, your customer data from your CRM and helpdesk tool can only tell you a part of the story. The other part lies with the customer. And no form of technology can magically help you read it.

It only makes sense to dive into this rich pool of information from your customer base by acquiring their feedback after every customer interaction. 

By doing this, you can gain insight into whether their needs are being sufficiently met, what financial products or services they’re interested in, their financial goals for the future, how their customer experience can be improved, and more.

There are a number of ways to gain customer feedback, but the most practical approach is to establish check-ins across all touchpoints. 

For example, if a customer were to contact your bank’s call center with a service request, the representative responsible for processing that request might close out the call by asking whether the customer had any additional questions and whether they were satisfied with the service they received. 

9. Revitalize Digital Experience

Every customer engagement platform needs a digital-friendly service experience that gets customers what they need regardless of the device they use.

For example, customers can be easily frustrated if they try to open a new credit card from a mobile device, only to be redirected to a full-size desktop webpage. In the worst cases, customers are forced to physically sign documents or come into a branch to even begin the process. 

Mobile-first banks are prepared against shifts in device preference with the flexibility to meet their customers wherever they are. Mobile users have already exceeded those of traditional online banking.

A dynamic interface design and full-featured portals on any platform feel more approachable, ultimately keeping customers loyal.

Providing an end-to-end digital facelift can also involve no manual processes. Managing documents via electronic signatures and other tools can streamline your backend to improve customer service. 

Even when leaving room for customers who prefer paper, digitizing behind the scenes will help you keep all their information at your team’s fingertips. 

10. Make Use of Contextual Data 

Leveraging contextual data is an excellent way for banks and financial institutions to survive and thrive in the long run. 

In a nutshell, contextual data refers to any form of information that provides valuable context about a person/organization and an event.

In banks and financial institutions, contextual data can be used to identify behavioral patterns and gauge customer loyalty, which they can then use to improve customer relationships. 

The data collected can also be used to create bespoke financial solutions specifically tailored to meet the needs of every customer. For banks and financial institutions, their most valuable sources of contextual customer data are their help desks and CRM (customer relationship management) tool.

While banks can use CRMs to track contact details, location, social media activity, and purchasing preferences of the customer, helpdesks or customer service software can be used to track their post-purchase interactions and their support requests.

Many help desk tools come with built-in analytics suites that can help you keep track of all your customer service KPIs without having to invest in another tool to track them. Every information can then be used to piece together a 360-degree view of the customer.

Furthermore, these customer profiles can help you tailor your financial products, upsell, cross-sell, create targeted marketing campaigns, and even design loyalty programs/provide preferential customer service.

3 Examples of Excellent Customer Service in Banking

Technology is rapidly changing the way we work, communicate, and bank. Those who are steering the ship understand the importance of not only better meeting consumers where they are today, but also planning ahead to proactively address new needs in the future. 

The below mentioned financial service leaders are freeing up members of the team to deliver higher levels of service and tailor offers to make banking more personal. 

1. Navy Federal Credit Union – Delivering effective omnichannel experiences

Virginia-based Navy Federal Credit Union exclusively serves the military, veterans, and their families — a segment to which it promises “once a member, always a member.” 

Great customer service is important in delivering on this promise, the Navy Federal Union realized that. 

“As a lender, it’s really important for us to be consistent in the member service experience” explained Prabha KC, a mortgage loan officer at the company. “If the members are overseas they can still access their loan information.” 

Offering self-service channels was one way the company sought to improve its service delivery, not only facilitating 24/7 support but also freeing up its member service representatives to do more added value work on behalf of their members. 

As a result of the implementation, the number of self-service applications doubled and the time taken to submit an application decreased by 40%.

2. BOK Financial – Making banking more personal

Investing in personalization empowers banks to deliver the white glove service that customers are looking for. In fact, the majority 72% of customers say that personalization is highly important in financial services today. 

Oklahoma-based BOK Financial adopted strategies to help it meet consumer demand for an intuitive and personalized banking experience.

By running consumer loans and mortgage applications, the company is delivering a tailored experience and, as a result, has seen completion rates more than triple. Moreover, the majority of volume now comes through digital channels — in stark contrast to the previous 15%. 

3. Amarillo National Bank – Adapting and responding to new needs

When banking teams prioritize their customers’ needs and preferences, they can deliver better service, and they can achieve more impactful customer relationships as a result.

During the global pandemic, many lenders, including Texas-based Amarillo National Bank (ANB), searched for ways to continue closing loans remotely. The value of hybrid and electronic closing methods quickly became clear. 

“We knew we had to move forward with the hybrid closings so that our customers didn’t have to go into the title companies to close their loans,” Debbie Bigelow, senior vice president, recalled. They will continue to adopt innovations that allow them to succeed in a rapidly changing operating environment.

Wrapping Up: Customer Service is Banking is Paramount

The financial services landscape is in constant flux, with new trends and regulatory measures emerging almost every day. To ensure that your financial institution delivers the best customer experience possible, you need to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and keep exploring the strategies to improve customer service in banking.

It is recommended that banks must open for change and constantly  look for ways to improve and embrace new technology. By listening to your customers and making smart investments in digital customer engagement tools, you can guarantee exceptional customer service at your bank or financial institute.

Business chatbots can save businesses as much as 30% on their customer support costs. They can also generate revenue by converting abandoned cart transactions into sales. 

While chatbots have become fixtures in the online retail space to streamline customer support, they have also been widely adopted in industries such as finance, telecom, healthcare, insurance etc. 

For companies looking to improve their customer experiences, the addition of chatbots to answer simple questions can improve satisfaction, streamline the customer journey, and provide customer-centric support.

What is a Business Chatbot?

Business chatbots refer to digital assistants that streamline interactions between people and services, enhancing customer experience. Simultaneously, they new opportunities to streamline the customer engagement process for efficiency that can reduce traditional support costs.

Chatbot for business helps in enhancing customer interactions with less human intervention. It can automatically respond to repetitive queries and even scrape your website for the information needed to answer more complex questions. Automating the process of responding to queries  with AI chatbot for business allows your team to deliver a more consistent experience.

Business chatbots can learn the correct way to respond to questions. Over time, with more interactions, it becomes more and more effective without the need for additional coding. And effectively every conversation is better than the last.

REVE Chatbot for Business 

REVE chatbots for businesses act as an incredible tool for forging good customer relationships. Businesses of all sizes can leverage it to build strong connections by engaging, and interacting with, users coming to the website. 

By integrating REVE business chatbots, you not only achieve marketing goals but also drive sales and improve customer service. Besides that, AI chatbots for businesses can translate into measurable gains.

Advanced Features of REVE Chatbot

• Visual Flow builder: Create your bot flow with the help of nodes and actions like text, image, carousel. Also set triggers as per the use case with no coding efforts and give a cute chatbot name. 
• Human handover: You can set a live chat takeover in case the user asks a complex query that the bot is not able to answer.  
• FAQs: Train your bot regularly by creating FAQs. It allows the bot to identify the user intent and have effective communication with the users. 
• Sentiment analysis: Understand your customer emotions and respond more accurately to deliver higher customer satisfaction. The feature trains the bot to nullify such responses and focus on the business objectives.
• Bulk Machine Learning (ML) Training: Import your own data in bulk to train your chatbot and improve the overall accuracy.
• Fallback option: There are multiple fallback options such as triggers, surveys to have a seamless conversation if the bot is not able to respond.
• Bot Analytics: Additional report to understand the leads generated by bots and its time trend.
• Data Sanitization: Convert your unstructured data into a structured one so that chatbots can deliver accurate responses.

How You Can Use REVE Business Chatbot?

REVE business chatbot can be widely leveraged across different industries like BFSI, healthcare, telecom, education, SaaS etc. to automate the business functions (such as customer support, sales) and deliver a personalized customer experience.

Let us discuss how REVE business chatbots help to accomplish the business tasks seamlessly reducing human intervention.

1. Customer Service

Bots streamline customer support through automation and can save consumers and businesses over 2.5 billion customer service hours by 2023.

Deploying REVE chatbots in business removes the support barriers that can occur when demand outpaces resources. Instead of waiting on hold, customers can get answers in real time. 

The frictionless service delivered improves brand experience. REVE business chatbots can analyze queries and answer customer questions promptly.

The Eva bot of HDFC bank helps to serve customers better and faster. It uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand the user query and fetch the relevant information from possible sources, in zero waiting time.

How does chatbot for business help in delivering improved customer service?

• Provide instant support 24×7 – If your business receives repetitive queries, implementing chatbots can be a wise way to provide instant support without making customers wait.
• Ensure hybrid support – When you offer hybrid support, you are easily able to strike an equilibrium between providing relaxation to the support team and offering qualified services to your leads. 
• Easy scalability – Businesses can easily balance scalability with both chatbots and live chat. The simple queries will be managed by the bot and the complex queries are handed over for human support.

By phasing out customer support staff to bring in chatbots, you can dramatically cut interaction times on all channels, including phone calls, social media, and messaging apps. It is one of the most prominent chatbot benefits.

2. Lead Generation

Considering how modern consumers prefer to interact with brands via messengers or chatbots, businesses can leverage this opportunity to generate leads and qualify those leads.

Business chatbots can be leveraged to steer customers through the sales funnel and marketing teams to generate qualified leads.

AI enabled bots can help in acquiring leads without a big investment – in fact, 55% of businesses that use AI chatbots go on to generate more high-quality leads.

Vainu, a data analytics service provider built VainuBot to engage with customers in rich conversations. The bot asks questions to the visitors to engage and qualify them. 

Businesses that aim at collecting lead information should create a lead generation chatbot, in order to acquire more qualified leads compared to a simple lead generation form. 

How chatbots for business help in lead generation?

• Chatbots can help to gain a better understanding of the audience about likes/dislikes, product interests, etc., by proactively asking questions and storing information. Bots can use it further for audience segmentation, enabling lead nurturing, and allowing brands to communicate ideal products/solutions.
• Business chatbots can also be used as a replacement for lead forms. It would be a new interactive experience for users and if the bot is integrated with the sales workflow, then new leads could be automatically created in the CRM system.
• AI bots for business can be programmed to ask specific prequalification questions and direct leads to the right team or schedule appointments based on the responses for further nurturing. 

It would help in automating the sales funnel and allow sales reps to focus on more time-consuming tasks, such as closing deals!

3. Appointment Booking

AI chatbots for business are advanced and meet the latest artificial intelligence trends, and can enable automated appointment booking to help customers book instantly from your website or Facebook page. 

Business chatbots are also being used across industries like hospitality, health care, and personal services. 

They can be connected to the calendar to offer appointment slots to your visitors so they can book meetings 24×7 without human assistance.

Leveraging a booking chatbot enables customers to schedule appointments whenever they are online, without needing a customer service representative to be available.

How does an appointment bot created by REVE Chat help your businesses?

• It allows visitors to self-schedule appointments
• You can collect additional information of the visitors
• Send calendar invitations for better engagement
• Inform the account executives about new meeting requests                   

4. Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is vital for every business to understand customer wants and align products/services to their expectations. It significantly impacts the overall business growth.

But what are the modern channels to acquire customer feedback?

Chatbots in business are a great way to acquire customer feedback. 

By following the chatbot best practices, you can generate a high level of engagement that encourages customers in completing surveys. 

Thus, it creates a win-win situation for both companies and clients.

Here’s how business chatbots offer feedback?

Chatbots are a great way to acquire customer feedback.  you can generate a high level of engagement, which encourages customers in completing surveys, thus creating a win-win situation for both companies and customers.

The key data point for actionable feedback is to acquire discrete data via open-ended questions. You can also scale from 0 to 10, and you need both quantitative and qualitative data to make the right decisions. The feedback bot can be deployed where your customers are, be it on your website or mobile app.

5. Order Confirmation and Shipping

Once the order is placed, the next obvious step is customers like to stay updated about the shipping information. 

The traditional way to find out the shipping details was via email. Then visit the company’s website  and enter the number in the delivery service section.

Chatbot for business is the best way to combat the traditional process and deliver an excellent brand experience. Customers can stay updated easily just by entering the shipping details.

Zalando, a renowned fashion brand of Europe, uses business chatbot to provide instant order tracking for its customers right after they have made a purchase. 

With exceptions, the involvement of the customer support team and handles conversations for more complex problems. 

7. Marketing Activities

Business chatbots can be widely used for marketing activities to reach out to a broader audience.

AI bots can learn from user interaction and share relevant information related to your business products/services. It will help to up-sell and cross-sell in a personalized, conversational, and engaging way. 

57% of businesses agree chatbots deliver large ROI with minimal effort.

A great example of a marketing chatbot – Spotify. Its Facebook Messenger bot makes it easy for its customers to search for, listen to, and share music.

Once you get started, you’ll get playlist recommendations based on your mood, what you’re doing, or any genre of music you want.

AI chatbot for business enhances marketing efforts and boost customer engagement in the following ways:

• Product recommendations – With bots, you can recommend products or combo offers based on the customer journey.
• Initiate proactive conversation – Bot can initiate proactive conversation while the customer is stuck within the product and guide them in the right direction.
• Personalized notifications – You can learn your customer behavior and improve your conversations by personalizing them.

How Much Does REVE Chatbot Cost? 

REVE Chat has curated special plans that fit perfectly to your business needs. Choose the right plan by signing up for a 14 days free trial to test-drive our chatbot platform. 

The Chatbot pricing and plans are as follows:

• Standard: $49/mo available with any live chat plan.
• Advanced: $249/mo available with any live chat plan.
• Enterprise: $499/mo, available with any live chat plan.

For custom requirements and any other queries, please feel free to reach out to us at chat support or email us at support@revechat.com.

How to Start Using REVE Chatbot

REVE Chat offers a ready-to-use chatbot platform that allows brands to create customized bots with zero coding based on business needs. 

You can deploy chatbots in a short time frame, train the bots and measure their performance much quicker compared to a custom solution. It is ideal for all businesses for different business functions like customer support, lead generation & sales to manage conversations in a hassle-free manner.

In order to start using REVE Chatbot, you need to follow the below-mentioned steps that are simple and easy.

1. Sign up to the REVE Chat dashboard by clicking “Start 14 days free trial”.

2. Go to ‘Chatbots’ in the dashboard menu and ‘Create New Bot’.

3. Then you have to customize your chatbot that matches your business.
4.  

• Bot Name: You can name your bot for internal business purposes. Your customers won’t be able to see this name. For e.g. Sales or Customer Service bot.
• Display Name: You can give a name to your bot that matches your personality. For example, Eva or Zoe. This name is displayed to your customers and makes them feel that they are interacting with the human agents.
• Tagline: You can set a designation of the chatbot, which can also be displayed to visitors and customers.
• Bot Avatar: You can personalize your bot by choosing an avatar from the gallery or upload of your choice. 
• Enable Channels: REVE Chat offers two channels for bot communication. (i) Website (ii) Facebook (iii) WhatsApp (iv) Viber . You can choose your preferred channel to deploy the chatbot for 24×7 assistance.  
• Bot Accuracy Levels: Here you need to select the query matching the accuracy level in percentage.
• Set Priority of Bot and Human Agent: You can choose from the three options to set the priority of bot and human agent for seamless communication.
• Set Triggers: REVE Chat offers four main triggers with sub-options. Based on the trigger you select, the chatbot will initiate conversations.

Visit our tutorial on “how to get started with REVE Chat” for broader understanding.

4. You need to build the flow of your business chatbot. Here you have to define your bot flow with nodes and actions. REVE Chat’s business chatbot builder offers various nodes and actions to define your bot flow accordingly.

Learn more chatbot overview and understand the different bot actions offered by REVE Chat.

5. The next step is creating intent samples. Here you can create new nodes for creating intent samples.

• You have to enter sample queries having the same meaning that covers customer intention while interacting with the bot.
• When you enter the sample queries, a list is created that is used by the bot to handle customer service conversations.

6. The next step is sentiment analysis that helps in developing the bot’s emotional intelligence. Here you can ‘Add the offensive words and emojis’ for your bot to identify the user’s sentiments during the conversation.

7. The next step is to set up synonyms. If the customer uses jargon in his query, the system will understand all the synonyms of it and can use it to match with the corresponding knowledge base.

8. Then comes Fallback options. It refers to a default interaction that pops up when the bot doesn’t recognize the user’s input. When users interact with your bot with a random request they expect a response. If your bot is not capable of fulfilling the user requests, it is not an ideal fit for those scenarios.

• Fallback Message: You can customize a fallback message when the bot is unable to understand the user requests. 
• Triggering Fallback: Here you can define the number of queries unknown to the bot for triggering the fallback option.
• Repeated Queries: It defines how the number of times the query will be repeated. You can choose your preferred number.
• Fallback Options: When the bot is unable to figure out the user intent, the system will prompt a fallback message or connect with a human agent according to the selected options.

9. Then you need to create FAQs for your business chatbot as it helps to learn about your business. It trains the bot to identify the user intent and have effective communication with the users. 

10. Train your business chatbot in regular intervals.

Now your business chatbot is ready to use. It can be deployed across different business functions successfully.

Business Chatbots are the Future!

Chatbots for business are great for handling simple customer inquiries and automating business processes. They can answer common questions and provide basic information about your products/services. It can free up your customer service team to handle more complex inquiries.

If you are looking to reduce shopping cart abandonment rates, provide better customer service, or simply want to increase sales, REVE business chatbots are a great way to achieve your goals. 

 Sign up for 14 days free trial to test drive REVE Chat today!

Messaging helps them build trust and make people feel more comfortable about their brand. 

77% of consumers also agree that they are more likely to buy from a brand that they follow and engage with on social media.

Facebook Messenger chatbot automation is the present and the future. Absolutely no doubts!!

What’s next?

According to Facebook, there are currently more than 300,000 active bots on Messenger. And that 80% of businesses plan to use Facebook Messenger bots by 2024? Here is a Successful Facebook case studies to market your brand.

It’s really no surprise. 

Messenger bots are hugely valuable to businesses and can be programmed to perform all kinds of tasks — everything from customer support to building brand awareness and even acquiring new customers!  

What is a Messenger Chatbot?

A Facebook Messenger Chatbot is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) fueled system that can respond to customer queries instantly 24×7 sent to your business via direct message. The main aim of the bot is helping the users with the necessary support in seconds.

The Messenger chatbot uses text, images, videos and combinations to communicate, making it one of the most effective and efficient models. It also offers triggers that help define your customer needs and show them the pathways for getting the potential answers.

Building a FB Messenger bot needs to be programmed to understand the questions, provide answers and assist people when using this artificial intelligence. A Messenger bot will use the Messenger app from Facebook to communicate in live artificial intelligence-driven conversations, which you can set up for any part of your business and marketing.

Key Benefits of Using a Facebook Messenger Chatbot

Facebook introduced the functionality of chatbots that integrated with their Messenger app as a new Facebook feature in the year 2016. The first Facebook Messenger chatbot was used with the Marriott and Starwood Group to help guests.

Facebook Messenger chatbot is one of the fastest-growing and most effective ways businesses can connect with customers seamlessly. Chatbots are the newest, easiest and most efficient tools for a business to communicate with customers over social media platforms and websites. 

Chatbots are the finest example of conversational AI and human intelligence coming together to serve the customers.

• Engage customers where they are – Your audience is already using Messenger, and they expect to be able to interact with your brand there. FB Messenger has the third-most active users of any app, building Messenger chatbots can increase response rate, making it easier for people to get the information in real-time.
• Automate sales – 83% of consumers say they would shop for or buy products in messaging conversations. With the right script, a Messenger bot can make sales. Conversational commerce allows for personalized recommendations, lead qualification, and upselling.
• Save time for business and customers – Customers expect 24/7 availability, and they hate waiting on hold. Facebook Messenger chatbot answers the easy questions and saves time with instant answers to their questions.

Different Ways Facebook Messenger Chatbots are Transforming Business (With Examples)

Facebook Messenger bot help businesses to build automated answers for responding to messages from potential customers.

Facebook chatbot framework is designed to help businesses automate customer support operations, assist in marketing campaigns and much more through engaging text and media message formats. 

Let us discuss the different ways FB Messenger AI bots help businesses.

1. Connect with Users via Facebook Messenger AI Chatbot

Usually, customers do not like to engage with Messenger chatbots unless the welcome message is interesting. 

A renowned clothing company prAna keeps users interested by giving the prAna bot a casual, friendly tone. The type of language helps make shoppers feel welcome and establishes a connection with them.

The more they are comfortable conversing with the chatbot, they are more likely to stay engaged and possibly make a purchase.

PrAna’s Messenger chatbot uses emojis and word choice to achieve its light tone. 

Instead of greeting the customer with “Welcome” or “Hello,” The bot starts with an informal “Hi, friend!” to initiate a friendly conversation.

The chatbot maintains a perfect balance between informing the customer and holding a relaxed conversation with them.

The user learns about clothing and receives guidance on what to do next in a way that feels like speaking with a human rather than a bot.

2. Handle Customer Queries 24×7

Facebook Messenger has emerged as a great customer service channel. It is crucial for businesses to integrate it into their customer service strategies and automate conversations to stay ahead of the competition.

You should understand the significance of integrating AI-powered Messenger bots into your customer engagement strategy and leverage them to accelerate the growth of your business.

From responding to customer questions to sending automated content blasts, Messenger bots can be programmed to perform all kinds of complex tasks. 

Plus, because bots are “always on” customers don’t have to wait to get the answers they’re looking for!

Evernote uses Messenger chatbot to collect basic information from the customer so a support rep is able to reach out when they’re back online.

When a customer messages the company, a bot replies asking for their email address and their question and then tells them a customer service representative will respond soon.

By sending a message right away, the bot creates an immediate contact with the customer, assuring them that their message will be addressed on time. It also lets the customer know what information the business requires to address their concerns instantly.

3. Frictionless Purchasing Journey for Customers

No matter if you are a delivery service or not, Messenger chatbots are useful for guiding users through the ordering process. 

By deploying a chatbot to handle ordering relieves your employees for other priority tasks and enables customers to make purchases without having to wait for the team to be available.

The famous pizza delivery service Domino’s uses their chatbot to take customers through the entire ordering process. It gives them three choices to start off: Order, Track Order, or Customer Support.

When the user begins to order, it shows the pizza options, with an “Add to Order” button below every choice.

If the customer has placed a Domino’s chatbot order previously, the bot will ask if they would like to repeat the same order. With these features, a FB Messenger chatbot makes the ordering process simple, both for Domino’s and for the customer.

4. Guide Customers Faster with Recommendations

Do you want to guide customers toward making purchases through Messenger? 

It’s very easy – build a Facebook bot to learn about customers’ preferences and deliver personalized recommendations.

Here is a good example of the travel-fare aggregator Kayak, that provides flight and hotel recommendations based on user input.

When the user clicks “Get Started,” Kayak immediately prompts more information about their travel requirements to narrow down exactly what exactly they are looking for.

By clicking “More Options,” the customer is able to ask the bot questions directly, and it will provide the most relevant answers it finds.

The bot also uses previous conversations and search history to provide targeted, personalized recommendations.

Leveraging previous conversations and search history makes interacting with the bot much more streamlined. It will build trust and brand credibility and foster better overall relationships.

5. Automate Sales and Lead Generation

Chatbots for lead generation are one of the best tools that help marketers to connect and engage with their prospects 24×7 even when the sales team is busy or not available.

Facebook Messenger chatbot makes it easy for potential customers to connect with your business anywhere, anytime.

You can create simple lead generation flows for Messenger using Ads manager. The bot provides information that the user is looking for and recommends products to match with the needs.

Key ways a Messenger chatbot can increase sales and help your business grow

• Improve brand awareness – Use your bot to talk with people who might not be familiar with your company, but have similar interests with your brand. Offer these new prospects a lead magnet, such as an ebook, in exchange for their email address. 
• Deliver prompt support – You not only get a reasonable Facebook Messenger bot pricing but also expect to save time and answer common questions that come through to your customer service team, which will encourage customers to stick around. 
• Stimulate repeat sales – Messenger bots not only help make first-time sales, but they can also encourage repeat sales, too. Ask users for feedback about their satisfaction with the purchase they made. Also, send a discount coupon on their birthday. 
• Driving website traffic – Website is the main source where customers interact primarily and decide to stay or leave. Using your chatbot helps to share the link to your website homepage, latest blog post, or a product page.

6. Collect valuable customer feedback

By building a Facebook Messenger chatbot you can acquire insightful feedback from your customers that will help your business constructively.

For example, Surveybot allows you to send your customers surveys after the completion of a task—a purchase, conversation, a download, a registration, etc. 

The user is already in Messenger when they receive the request, and they can complete the survey without having to navigate to a new page or fill out a separate form.

Surveybot is that it doesn’t require any coding knowledge. It’s 100% plug-and-play. Once you create a survey with this bot, Surveybot will provide a link to share through Messenger with your customers.

Customers expect companies to communicate through their preferred channels  and Surveybot allows your company to easily accommodate that while collecting feedback immediately after the customer interacts with your company.

7. Easy scheduling of appointments

Does your business offer appointments or services that need to be scheduled? 

By using Messenger chatbots your business can empower your customers to schedule appointments right from the app on the go. 

Leveraging a booking bot enables customers to schedule appointments whenever they are online, without needing a customer service representative to be available.

For instance, the popular beauty brand Sephora, allows customers to schedule in-store service appointments, such as makeovers or facials, using the Messenger chatbot.

On choosing “Book A Service” triggers a series of questions from the bot to help customers select the location and services they wish to schedule. Finally, a scheduling pop-up lets customers select a time available at the desired store.

When the customer enters the time, Sephora pulls the name and email of the user from Facebook to finalize the appointment.

By using a chatbot, Sephora makes it easy for customers to book services. There is no need to call a store or hunt for a scheduling tool on the company’s website. It can all be done in just a few steps through Facebook.

Sephora witnessed an 11% increase in in-store booking conversion rates over any other channel when they introduced the scheduling bot.

How to Build a Facebook Messenger Chatbot With REVE Chat Platform

While most companies are moving on social media platforms to connect with customers, businesses that leverage chatbots on social media platforms hold the chance to enhance their customer experience.

Hence, it is essential to know how a Facebook Messenger bot is built over the best chatbot platform. REVE Chat offers a ready-to-use chatbot platform that allows brands to create customized bots with zero coding based on business needs. 

You can deploy chatbots in a short time frame, train the bots and measure their performance much quicker compared to a custom solution. It is ideal for enterprises or small businesses across different use cases like customer support, lead generation & sales, healthcare, banking & insurance to manage conversations in a hassle-free manner.

Creating Facebook Messenger chatbot with REVE Chat is a simple process. You need to follow simple steps for a chatbot for Facebook Messenger to work.

Here are the steps on how to build a Messenger chatbot successfully.

1. Sign up REVE Chat by clicking “Start 14 days free trial”.

2. Once you sign up successfully, the next step is to integrate the live chat to your desired web pages. You can copy the small code snippet and paste on the website. 

Check out “how to install REVE Chat” to your website to avoid any mistakes.

3.  Then comes the main part. You have customize your chat window that complements your business website by choosing, color, theme, customized welcome message and many more.

Explore more in our tutorial on “how to get started with REVE Chat” for more understanding.

4. Now to go Integrations -> Social Media Channels -> Connect Facebook Page. Your business FB page is successfully integrated with REVE Chat. 

You can easily manage all the conversations and comments in real time effectively under REVE Chat dashboard.

NOTE: Now as a business, if you think that you want to deliver 24×7 support, automate sales & lead generation, provide real time recommendations, schedule appointments, order food right from Facebook Messenger, you need to create a bot as per your use case and enable the channels you want your customers to reach you out.

5. For that first of all you have to create a bot by choosing ready to use templates or customize as per your need.

Refer to “how to build a chatbot” for creating a chatbot successfully.

6. Once the bot is created successfully, you have to set the profile that comprises various fields.

• BOT Name – You can name your bot for internal business purposes. Your customers won’t be able to see this name. For e.g. Sales or Customer Service bot.
• Display Name – You can give a name to your bot that matches your personality. For example, Eva or Zoe. This name is displayed to your customers and makes them feel that they are interacting with the human agents.
• Tagline – You can set a designation of the chatbot, which can also be displayed to visitors and customers.
• BOT Avatar –  You can personalize your bot by choosing an avatar from the gallery or upload of your choice. 
• Enable Channels –  REVE Chat offers two channels for bot communication. (i) Website (ii) Facebook (iii) WhatsApp (iv) Viber . You can choose your preferred channel to deploy the chatbot for 24×7 assistance.  
• Bot Accuracy Levels – Here you need to select the query matching the accuracy level in percentage.
• Set Priority of Bot and Human Agent – You can choose from the three options to set the priority of bot and human agent for seamless communication.
• Set Triggers – REVE Chat offers four main triggers with sub-options. Based on the trigger you select, the chatbot will initiate conversations.

7. Once you set the bot avatar, you need to enable the channels that are relevant for your business. Enable Facebook Messenger here. That’s it!

You are done!

Isn’t simple to deploy a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. 

Now you can customize the welcome message to your preferences.

That’s literally it.

You can then test the welcome message directly in Messenger once you have customized it.

The entire process takes about five minutes, start to finish.

Once you are in, you can explore the full range of advanced chatbot features offered by REVE Chat. They are as follows:

Advanced REVE Chat Features

• Visual Flow builder: Create your bot flow with the help of nodes and actions like text, image, carousel. Also set triggers as per the use case with no coding efforts and give a cute bot name. 
• FAQs: Train your bot regularly by creating FAQs. It allows the bot to identify the user intent and have effective communication with the users. 
• Human handover: You can set a live chat takeover in case the user asks a complex query that the bot is not able to answer.  
• Sentiment analysis: Understand your customer emotions and respond more accurately to deliver higher customer satisfaction. The feature trains the bot to nullify such responses and focus on the business objectives.
• Fallback option: There are multiple fallback options such as triggers, surveys to have a seamless conversation if the bot is not able to respond.
• Bulk Machine Learning (ML) Training: Import your own data in bulk to train your chatbot and improve the overall accuracy.
• Data Sanitization: Convert your unstructured data into a structured one so that chatbots can deliver accurate responses. 
• Bot Analytics: Additional report to understand the leads generated by bots and its time trend.

The chatbot platform is available at $44 per month with any of the plans. 

You can login to your account or sign up for 14 days free trial to test drive REVE Chatbot platform. 

For any custom chatbot solution, you can request a quote by contacting at sales@revechat.com. Also check out the latest chatbot pricing and plans to choose the right one for your business.

Automated Facebook Comment Management

Facebook is one of the leading messaging platforms preferred by both consumers and businesses. Hence, Facebook is a key channel to be included by businesses for conversational marketing and helps in achieving higher business growth. 

Furthermore, automated Facebook comment management comes into play here.

REVE Chat helps businesses to use Facebook as a channel to manage FB accounts directly. Deploying a chatbot for Messenger will help in managing Facebook comments effectively by responding instantly 24×7 even when the support team is not available.

Handling all the conversations and comments in real time will enable businesses to deliver a consistent experience. 

By integrating your Facebook messaging with the customer engagement tool, you can connect to multiple channels and manage your FB account directly. 

Key benefits of automating Facebook comments

• You can automate handling of Facebook comments & messages and the complex issues can be handed over to the right team member. It will improve your team productivity. 
• The fb Messenger bot will track your conversations across Facebook comments & Messenger in real time so that you don’t lose your customers.
• You can measure your Messenger bot performance with chatbot analytics and reporting. Gain better insights into how the conversations are managed by your bot and the areas of improvement.

Tips for Using Facebook Messenger Bots

So made up your mind to leverage Messenger bots to improve customer engagement and increase conversions?

Superb!

Here are a few tips that can help you build your own Messenger bot and use it to grow your business:

• Outline your expectations from the Messenger bot. What do you want the bot to do?
• Personalize conversations. You should avoid too much text in bot conversations and use emojis.
• Test, update, and optimize conversations on a regular basis to deliver a great customer experience.
• Always have a human handover option to handle complex issues that bot fails to answer.
• Keep evolving your Messenger bot continuously by identifying your strengths and weaknesses.

Develop Instant Connections with Facebook Messenger Chatbot

Actually, there are so many ways you can use Messenger chatbots to engage with customers.

Just to mention a few – you could use them to promote surveys, collect customer orders, or guide customers through purchase journey significantly.

Use Messenger chatbots to create faster and long lasting customer relationships, even when your team is busy or not available.

Choose REVE Chatbot platform to build your FB Messenger chatbot and serve to make customers feel heard and assure them that your company is not ignoring their Facebook messages. Sign in with REVE Chat today!